User's Manual
10
Photomatix Essentials 4.0 User Manual
2.1.6 Alignment and Deghosting Options
After you click Next: Adjust & Preview in the Step 1 window, the Alignment and Deghosting Options dialog
appears. Note that you can set an option in Preferences to skip this dialog.
Because bracketed photos are always misaligned when shot hand held, image alignment is an essential feature
of HDR processing. Photos are often slightly misaligned even when shot using a tripod, due to wind or other
sources of minor camera disturbances. The Align bracketed photos option is therefore is on by default in
Photomatix Essentials.
NOTE: There are cases when images should not be aligned. One example is when you have derived the
dierent exposures from a single RAW le, by adjusting the Exposure setting of your RAW converter. Another
example is when you are processing stitched panoramas.
The Crop aligned images option removes the unneeded borders resulting from alignment adjustments.
Unchecking it disables this, so that the resulting image has exactly the same width and height as the source
images, but may have white areas around the edges.
Ghost removal addresses the problem of artifacts that appear when combining bracketed images of a scene
with some moving elements. For example, if pedestrians are moving through a scene while you capture your
bracketed photos, multiple faint images of the people will appear in the combined image, as if they were
“ghosts”.
To reduce these artifacts, select Remove ghosts and set a Deghosting strength. There are 5 levels of deghosting
strength, from Very Mild to Very Strong. Since deghosting lowers image quality, always choose the most
mild deghosting setting possible. If some ghosts remain visible in the Step 2 Preview, you may close the Step 2
window to return to Step 1, then select a higher deghosting setting, before returning to Step 2.
The Alignment and Deghosting Options dialog